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Monday, 2 June 2014

The Transformers Marathon. The start of the war: Transformers Generation 1, the first wave

With the release of Transformers 4: Age of Extinction coming soon, I thought
it would be fitting to countdown its release (and most likely finish past its
release) in cinemas with a marathon of Transformers. What is there to say about
Transformers? It’s a series to which its plot has never developed past your
basic Good vs. Evil. So why is it still popular to this day? Why do the toys
keep selling? I want to say I was around 7-9 (I’m not exactly sure but I do
remember the first Transformer I ever got) years old when I got into the series
and while I haven’t seen every season of Transformers (such as the Japan
exclusives) or played every game, what I’ll be reviewing is still a decent
portion of the franchise. With that said, time to start things off with the
first ever generation, The Transformers (more commonly referred to as
Transformers G1). This review will just be covering the first two seasons (what
I will be calling “first wave”) with the last two seasons reviewed latter on in
this marathon.

The plot of the first half of generation 1? Well for the first season at
least: the Decepticons want to steal Earth’s energy to take over the universe
(insert stereo typical “OF COURSE!” scene here) and the Autobots have to stop
them... Doesn’t seem like a compelling story does it? The writers do however
provide interesting stories that fall under this basic, overarching concept,
such as multi planet stories, shifting from Earth to Cybertron and back again.
The main reason why the story kept people watching was when they introduced new
Transformers. Over the course of the seasons, new transformers would join
either the Autobots or the Decepticons including Skyfire, the Dinobots,
Constructicons, Astrotrain and more. The other aspect of the plot is this,
while the overarching plot is bland, the individual episodes were quite
interesting. There are times however where the story felt rushed, with one of
the worst examples being the pilot episodes. There was a argument between
Optimus Prime and Spike and Sparkplug about their help fighting the
Decepticons. Spike and Sparkplug say that they know more about the planet then
they do and Optimus just agrees then and there, it was poorly written and could
have been better.

The animation on the other hand is... dated. The animation is quite nice
considering other shows at the time, but doesn’t look good compared to newer
animations. The fight scenes are slow and clunky. On top of that, there are
several times where the animation and the sound don’t match up and scenes that
just don’t make sense to what’s happening. It might be because of the versions
I watched but these could be actual issues with the show. There are times where
there were animation errors, mainly lack of colour in small portions of the
shot, but these are forgivable as they don’t really matter in the long term...
most of the time. There are rare cases of obvious miss colours of transformers,
including multiple Starscream’s in the same shot. My big complaints with the animation
are some of the transformations, with Megatron, Soundwave and Reflector being
some of the worst when it comes to this. The sizes of some of the
transformations don’t make sense. Megatron shouldn’t be able to transform into
a gun that size, Soundwave shouldn’t be able to turn into a tape recorder (did
I mention that it was a 80’s cartoon) and the three transformers that make
Reflector shouldn’t be able to turn into a camera. A lot of the smaller
Autobots also fall into this category but not to the same scale, I’m more
likely to believe that Bumblebee, who’s only slightly bigger then a human, can
transform into a normal size Volkswagen bug, then I am to believe that three
transformers can turn into a standard camera (for the time).

The characters themselves do have distinct personalities, even if they are
rushed some times (most of the time...). Optimus and Megatron’s personalities
conflict in several ways, giving a subtle reason for the war, the human
characters are distinct enough however they don’t really develop during the
story (or if they do, it’s so slowly that you don’t notice). I would go into
more detail regarding personalities, but because of the sheer number of
characters that are in the story, it would be a review in itself. I will say
however, the personalities of the characters don’t change from this generation
if they appeared in this generation (for the most part).

It’s understandable for something like Transformers’ first season to have
these issues; it was a 16 episode season with obviously low budgets, but what
about the second season? The animation quality for the second season is better,
as there are fewer animation errors (and the ones that are there are far
between). The budget also shows a improvement as the backdrops are much bigger
in comparison to the first season and the season itself is much longer. The
plot still feels a bit rushed but its better then season 1. As for the
soundtrack of the two seasons, most of the tracks are really forgettable and repetitive.
There wasn’t any standout background track and after a while, they become ear
grading as they just become annoying (though that might be because I watched the
seasons in a week, with little distractions in terms of other entertainment). I
will admit though that the theme song, like a lot of 80’s cartoons, is great
with my personal favourite version so far (for generation 1) being the version for season 2. There is a reason why fans wanted the theme to be in the Bay films.

The first two seasons of Transformers did their job’s well. It introduced
kids to the concept and it set the stage, standards, and lore of the entire
franchise. If you intend to watch it, you have to switch your mind off and acknowledge
that the shows are 30-40 years old now. If you’re a fan of the Transformers
series, I would recommend watching them, just to see how far the franchise has
come. For people new to the franchise, Generation 1 (at least seasons 1 and 2) isn’t
the best generation to start in comparison to the latter generations. It’s
flawed but the concept itself is still great to this day. But there are aspects
to the first generation that I haven’t covered yet so up next: Transformers the
Movie.